Welcome to the course

Total course time: approximately 1 hour

Welcome to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s (OAIC) eLearning course on conducting a privacy impact assessment (PIA). This course aims to give you information in an easy-to-understand format so that you can have the confidence to do a PIA in your organisation.

Who should complete this course?

This course is designed for people who are new to the PIA process and would like to:

The course is designed for organisations and Australian Government agencies covered by the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act), however it will be relevant for any organisation that wants to take a best practice approach to privacy.

How to use this course

We encourage you to work through each of the course topics from beginning to end, but the program is designed so that you can visit topics separately if necessary.

You can navigate through the course by using the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons at the end of each module, or through the menu on the right-hand side of your screen (the menu could also be at the top of your screen, depending on your screen size).

Each topic includes:

Learning objectives

An introductory video

Course content

Learning activities to assess your knowledge

A case study — so you can see how the concepts discussed might work in practice

You can watch the video for each topic, and then scroll down to learn more about the concepts introduced in the video.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Did you know’ cards for extra hints and information to help you with your project’s PIA.

‘Did you know’ cards contain extra hints and information to help you with your project’s PIA.

DownloadYour PIA worksheet

You may be undertaking this course because you have to complete a PIA for a particular project.

We have provided a ‘Your PIA’ worksheet, so you can start your own PIA as you work through the course. This will give you the opportunity to start to apply the concepts introduced in this course to a specific project in your workplace. At the end of the course, your PIA will be underway.

Your privacy

You do not need to create a user account to do this course. Your progress is saved only in your browser’s local storage. If you use multiple devices to do the course, you will not be recognised from device to device.

We do not collect any of your personal information. We do collect web analytics in Piwik, which is stored on our Australian server.

You can reset your progress at any time by selecting the ‘Restart the course’ option in the menu.